by Greg Herren
Only humans can hate, as I know all too well.
Despite the dread I feel all the way down to my bones, in my dream I am always compelled to start walking across the back lawn, that horrible sense of my own defeat and failure growing with each step forward toward the beautiful house that never felt like my home, helpless to turn and run away down the beach as I so desperately want to do. Each time my bare feet touch the cool, damp grass I have to resist the urgent need to escape, to run around to the front of the house, get behind the wheel of one of the cars and flee.
The swimming pool is dark, but the howling wind from the sea is creating little waves that gently lap at the sides. The tennis court over near the towering hedges is also dark, and I can see fuzzy green tennis balls nestled in the grass alongside, waiting for someone to pick them up. Each slow, hesitant step takes me closer to the wide stone steps leading up to the gallery running the entire back length of the house. I am cold, so terribly cold, and the sense that the house wants me to come inside grows even stronger. The tall bushes on either side of the big lawn sway and wave in the wind, the leaves and branches rustling and rubbing together so that they seem to talk, sending me urgent warnings to run, that I am in danger, that I need to get away and never come back.
Yet I ignore these warnings, because I know that I must finally get the answers to the questions I’ve obsessed over, wondered about, for so long—and somehow I can get them if I can get inside the house. But the wind gets steadily colder and colder, my teeth begin to chatter and my body shakes with shivers, and the sense of dread and foreboding keeps rising within me, my heart is pounding and my breathing far too rapid for my own good—but yet somehow the compulsion remains, irresistible, driving me forward, my legs refusing to obey the commands from my brain to stop.
I am terrified of what I will discover, yet desperately want, and need, to know.
And I know somehow that it will not end well, it cannot end well—not now in the dream nor ever in real life, yet I keep walking.
I finally reach the steps to the back gallery, and the stone is bitterly cold against the soles of my feet. Knowing I have no other choice, I start climbing.
In my dream there are many more steps than there are in reality. I climbed up and down those steps many times, and it never took more than a matter of minutes. Yet there are so many in my dream that it seems to take hours for me to make it all the way up, shivering from the cold, to the gallery. The moon disappears behind a silvery cloud for a moment as I place one foot in front of the other, step by step making my way to the gallery itself. A light comes on in the farthest window to the left from where I stand, shivering, forever an outsider, never welcome, never wanted, always a stranger, in this stunningly beautiful home.
And I know that light is in my bedroom.
Wondering—and fearing—who might be in my room, I finally reach the back gallery, the wood made soft by exposure to the elements and the ever-present sea air. The wind dies down like it was never blowing, and the chill I was feeling fades quickly away.
There is a wrought iron table, with matching wrought iron chairs on each side of it, sitting just outside the huge cut-glass French doors that lead inside to the great room. Many mornings I sat at that table, watching the sea and drinking coffee. I walk toward the table, as I did so many mornings when I called Spindrift my home. The table was one of the only places at Spindrift where I ever felt at peace, where I drank my morning coffee and could forget about the empty day stretching before me, where I could fantasize about making my escape from this life I wasn’t born to, wasn’t meant to lead, was never meant to have.
There is a large ashtray made from Murano glass sitting in the direct center of the table, and a cigarette still smolders in it, its red ember glowing.
The burning cigarette is a mystery puzzling me in my dream, and I always pick it up, holding it between two fingers as I wonder, in my dream state, to whom it could belong, who could have left it behind, and where the smoker could have gone. For I saw nothing, no movement, no sign of life on the gallery as I made my slow walk up from the shoreline, and the person to whom it belonged must have only just recently abandoned it.
The wind picks up again as I sit at the table, the table I once thought of as mine, as no one else used it other than me. It was one of the few things at that time I could think were mine, as nothing else belonged to me. Nothing in that house belonged to anyone who still lived there. There was always a sense that the house was merely ours for the moment, and it was waiting, always waiting, for the true owner to return.
And I know, deep inside my heart and soul, who the cigarette truly belongs to—even though I cannot admit it to myself in my dream or when I am awake and remembering. It is a name I refuse to say, a name that is forbidden and must never be said, a subject that must always remain closed and never to be discussed.
Even though it haunts my dreams and my memory, it must never be said.
It is while I am holding the cigarette that I wake, and every time it is the middle of the night—it is always around three in the morning when my sleepy and tired eyes finally can discern the time on a nearby clock. I sit in my bed, my arms twisted around me, and I shiver as the memory of those dreadful, horrible days at Spindrift replay over and over in my mind and tears spill out of my eyes as I hug myself in the darkness, waiting for the kaleidoscope of memory to finally run down—memories of a time I must never allow myself to speak about, a time of which I would not be able to bring myself to speak even were the subject not firmly and determinedly closed forever.
And as I sit up in my bed, slowly getting my emotions under control as the memories begin to fade away again when the warm breeze off the Aegean Sea warms my cold skin, I know that what happened at Spindrift will always be a part of me, always lurking in my subconscious.
I might go days, weeks, even months without having the dream—but it will come again.
Of that much, I can be certain.
Because even now, after all the time that has passed and the many miles that have been traveled, Spindrift is never really far from my thoughts.
It is a name that must never be mentioned, never spoken, never discussed. Spindrift belongs to another time in my life, a chapter that is now closed, a time that would be best forgotten.
And I do try. Each day I smile and go about my business, shopping, eating, touring. I greet acquaintances and take great pleasure in knowing that they see nothing beyond the pleasant, placid façade I have built around myself. My hands do not shake, my voice is firm and strong, and I always lose myself in minutiae, making sure that everything is packed and nothing left behind, booking seats on airplanes and trains, returning rented vehicles and ordering town cars, making excuses and refusing invitations—all the minute little details that keep my mind busy so that my subconscious cannot sneak up on me unawares and bring it all to the front.
Oh, yes, my conscious mind can put all the thoughts and memories of Spindrift aside. It can easily pretend I have moved on, that we have both moved on, and neither of us has any care about what happened there—but my subconscious will never allow me to forget.
There are always triggers, of course—a certain brand of cigarette, an unexpected cold wind from the sea, the smell of a wet dog.
For Spindrift is now, and will always be, a part of me.
It doesn’t matter whether I am lying on a beach in St. Tropez, my skin slathered with coconut oil, or I am sipping a frozen cocktail on St. Bart’s, or simply sitting in a café in Vienna, enjoying a piece of strudel with a strong cup of black coffee. It matters not if I am skiing in Gstaad, or shopping in Paris, or attending a play in London’s West End.
No matter how far I go, no matter how much time passes, Spindrift is always there in the back of my mind. For Spindrift was there first, and will not let go of its hold on my mind and my imagination.
I can never return to Spindrift, and doubt I would if it were possible. As much as I tried to love the house, it never welcomed me an
d it didn’t want my love. It rejected me, and I knew I never belonged there.
For Spindrift was his house, and always would be.
And if Spindrift is a name that cannot ever pass my lips, his name is even more forbidden, a talisman that must never be said aloud.
But his name is always the last thing I hear in my dream, before I wake and hug myself for warmth; the last thing I hear, which leaves me trembling in my bed as my eyes open, as I sit up and pray my trembling will cease before it wakes up the man snoring next to me.
And his name comes to me now, when I hear the sound of the waves as my mind drifts off into the darkness of sleep, haunting me as it did when I was there in the house, haunting me no matter how far I get away from the beautiful house on Long Island.
Timothy…
Chapter One
It is funny to think how differently my life would have turned out had Valerie Franklin not been the kind of woman she was.
The kindest way to describe her is to say she is difficult.
Perhaps this is unfair to Valerie, but the passage of time has yet to soften the memory of the year I endured in her employ. It was a very hard year—for she was a tough taskmaster who demanded perfection from the people who worked for her. But in fairness, she demanded no less from herself—if anything, she drove herself harder than she drove her staff. It couldn’t have been easy for her to claw her way from the very bottom of the food chain to the position of executive editor of a major national magazine like Street Talk by the time she was forty—and there were undoubtedly many bodies left in her wake. Magazine publishing is still pretty much an old boys’ club, so for a woman to rise so quickly she had to be tough—tougher than they were, and not be afraid to get her hands dirty or to play rough.
Valerie certainly had no scruples when it came to getting what she wanted out of life. She arrived at the magazine right out of college as a fresh-faced young woman of twenty-two, getting an entry-level position as a copy editor and armed with a lot of drive and ambition. Within three years she was an associate editor, and within another two years she was editor-in-chief. It took her another five years to become executive editor of Street Talk and the toast of Manhattan. Her rise only took ten years—which was remarkable in itself. There were, of course, nasty stories about how she accomplished this so quickly, but she certainly believed in hard work and was incredibly dedicated to her job—which was why none of her marriages or liaisons lasted very long.
So, yes, Valerie was pretty beastly to the people who worked for her. I always assumed it was because she was a woman and believed she had to prove she earned her job through hard work and talent rather than on her back.
Working for Valerie was an education, whether you loved her or hated her. Many writers and editors who learned from her became enormously successful once they left Street Talk. She made no excuses for herself, and therefore had no desire to hear excuses from anyone else. You either had done it properly or you hadn’t. She was never angry—she never lost her temper and screamed obscenities at anyone. Rather, she lowered her voice when chastising someone, her tone dripping with the contempt and disgust she felt for failure.
It was an enormously effective technique.
I can say with relative certainty that there were several psychoses heavily involved in the makeup of her powerful personality; there was more than just a touch of obsessive-compulsion mixed carefully with a generous sprinkling of anal retention, for example. Things had to be done not only her way, but exactly the way she wanted them.
She had an odd relationship with men; she loved men but she didn’t trust them. More than once I heard her say she wished she’d been born a gay man. Gay men were the only men she could really trust and let down her guard with, and she surrounded herself with them.
But there was also no question that Valerie Franklin was very good at her job. Street Talk billed itself as the journal of American culture, and she certainly had her finger on the pulse of what was about to become hip and trendy—the books, the movies, the television shows, the plays, the music, the clothes, the styles. She had doubled the circulation since she took over; in a time when other magazines were cutting staff and pages or closing up shop, she kept Street Talk not only relevant but ahead of the curve. Somehow she seemed to sense what was going to be hot—and while everyone else was scrambling to catch up with her, she’d already moved on to find the next big thing. Being profiled in the magazine was an enormous boost to anyone’s career—so those with ambitions were willing to do almost anything to get that coverage. Her phone rang off the hook with invitations to anything and everything. Every day her mail was full of DVDs of soon-to-be released films, galleys of books, gifts of clothes and perfumes and new gadgetry, months before they were available to the general public.
I worked for her my first year out of college—reporting to my first day of work just three weeks after skipping my graduation ceremony.
I wish I could claim she hired me because she saw a raw talent that she desired to mold into something spectacular, but that would not be the truth. She hired me because my father had been her faculty adviser and professor when she herself was in college, and she credited him with inspiring her success. He had believed in her, pushed her, and she honestly believed that were it not for him, she would have wound up just another soccer mom in Wichita.
When my father died just before my finals, she saw giving me a start in the business as a way to repay the debt she believed she owed him.
My father was himself a multiple winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a professor of journalism at a small college in Kansas. He frequently wrote editorials for the local newspaper—which is where the Pulitzers came from—but he had no interest in the day-to-day world of a newspaper. He simply wrote his editorials and sent them in to the editor, who would squeeze them in somehow and send him a check. Sometimes he was asked to write for other papers and magazines, and most often he refused. He preferred academia to the rough-and-tumble world of the daily newspaper. He was, however, very well known and respected in the field.
Valerie Franklin was his prize pupil.
He spoke of her often. I grew up with an encyclopedic knowledge of the amazing Valerie Franklin. They spoke on the telephone at least once a week, and I know they were in constant touch via e-mail. She never visited—my father once said she’d told him when she left Kansas she would never come back, and she’d been true to her word. My father also loathed travel, rarely venturing beyond the city limits of our small college town, so I never met her before my father’s funeral. My sole experience with her was speaking to her occasionally when she called and I happened to answer the phone. She was always polite, but never friendly.
My father held her example up to me on a regular basis. He subscribed to Street Talk magazine; years of issues were scattered throughout the dusty house I grew up in. Each time a new issue would arrive, he would pore over it with the same degree of intensity a fundamentalist would use on the Bible. Once he had read every word, he would pass it to me for me to analyze and dissect, page by page. When school was out for summer vacation—or for Christmas—he required me to write lengthy papers about each issue, what worked and what didn’t, and why. She might not have ever set foot in the two-story brick house on Market Street just a few blocks away from the university campus, but Valerie Franklin’s presence was felt in every cluttered room. The house was filled with mismatched ramshackle furniture, and every available surface was piled high with books, magazines, and newspapers. My mother had died when I was very young; I had no memory of her. As far as I knew, it had always been just my father and I. A local woman came in five days a week to clean and do laundry and buy groceries and make our meals. Mrs. Harris soon gave up trying to keep the clutter under control, and simply focused on things she could control—like the kitchen. My father agreed not to clutter the kitchen, and she agreed to not touch the growing piles in the other rooms. The house was dusty and every corner had cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. My fa
ther was an unrepentant smoker who couldn’t be bothered to empty overflowing ashtrays, and the house always seemed to be filled with stale smoke.
There was no question I would major in anything other than journalism when I was admitted to college; there was also no question that I would attend the university where my father taught so that I could continue to keep him company in that house. The possibility of any other college was never discussed or mentioned—which was more than fine with me.
The small Kansas college town was all I knew of the world—and I was more than satisfied with it. I never thought much about the future. In retrospect, I find my childlike naïveté, and lack of planning for the future almost shameful and embarrassing. I suppose I must have believed that I would graduate and go on to teach in the journalism school, all the while continuing to live with my father. Despite his admiration for Valerie Franklin’s ambition and drive, my father never tried to instill those traits in me. I was a naturally shy child who hated being called on in class and never knew how to talk to other children. I could never think of anything to say, and I had no familiarity with games or sports or any of the things other children took for granted. I grew up without friends, but never having had any, didn’t actually miss them. We had no television, and only rarely would my father take me to see a movie. My companions were books, magazines, and newspapers. The written word was God in our household, and must be paid regular obeisance.
It also didn’t help knowing that I was attracted to boys. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know—and that difference, in an incredibly conservative town that seemed to have a church on every other corner, made me withdraw even further into myself.
I don’t know if my father ever knew or figured it out.
Every day I walked to class and then came home to read and study. I kept to myself and was a pretty decent student.
